Page:A dissertation on the puerperal fever (1789).djvu/11





HE puerperal fever is a disorder peculiar to women in child-bed; and although it is probable it hath happened in all ages of the world, its cause is still involved in much obscurity, and its mode of treatment left, in a great measure, undecided.

The numbers cut off by this disease, in Canada, have moved my compassion, and excited me to enquire into its nature, and to try to ascertain the proper method of cure; but alas! I find even the most celebrated English physicians, who have written on the subject, differing in judgment with each other, and the same appearances after death explained in a different, and sometimes opposite manner.

Some practitioners doubt, whether it be a primary or a secondary disease. Some confider it as arising from an inflammation of the uterus;, others suppose it to be occasioned